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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25333030">the parabola of lost seasons</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/estora/pseuds/estora'>estora</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Rumours and Sightings: Daud [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dishonored (Video Games)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, Not Canon Compliant</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 05:00:06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>7,435</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25333030</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/estora/pseuds/estora</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It is said that his mother was a witch from one of the archipelagos off the Pandyssian coast, taken captive by pirates venturing far from the Isles. According to the legend, by the time the ship returned, the captain was dead and the witch controlled the crew, with Daud still a shadow in her belly.<br/>— <strong>Rumours and Sightings: Daud</strong></p><p>“<em>Haven’t seen you around here before,” the bartender says when Daud slides into a seat at the bar, grimacing and brushing silver dust from his hair and face. “Traveller?” </em></p><p><em>Does he look so different? So foreign? The only thing his mother ever told him about the man who sired him was that he was Serkonan, and the duskiness of his skin used to be enough of a giveaway. “Native,” Daud replies shortly. “Returning. It’s been a while.</em>”</p><p>Daud returns to the place he once called home.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Daud &amp; Original Female Character</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Rumours and Sightings: Daud [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2152542</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>52</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>the parabola of lost seasons</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p><a href="https://ficbook.net/readfic/5302420/comments#content">Translated</a> into Russian by Ink Che.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It is said that his mother was a witch from one of the archipelagos off the Pandyssian coast, taken captive by pirates venturing far from the Isles.<br/>
According to the legend, by the time the ship returned, the captain was dead and the witch controlled the crew, with Daud still a shadow in her belly.</p><p>—<strong> Rumours and Sightings: Daud</strong></p><p>
  <em>The captain is an ugly man, with a slightly deformed chin that’s too big, his teeth yellowed and rotted, and his hot breath on her face that stinks of halitosis, like the rich, thick scent of curdled milk. She no longer gags when he pants over her, his body thrusting into her, pounding her flesh with increasing desperation because each night it gets harder and harder for him to reach arousal and harder and harder for him to come, and he has no idea why. She grimaces and bears his cock that isn’t nearly as large as he thinks it is, turns her face to the side when he tries to kiss her, and clenches her jaw shut when he coaxes her to say his name.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Scream for me, witch,” he grunts, his sweat dripping over her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She does not, and in between thrusts he strikes her across face.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“You should feel lucky I’m treatin’ ye like a woman, Pandyssian whore,” he snarls, his balls shrivelling as he gets closer to completion. “I could’ve had you scrub the shitter like the rest of your savage kind.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She would have much preferred to scrub the shitter, she thinks, but the captain isn’t listening any longer – he thrusts again, once, twice, then finally growls as he spills himself deep inside of her, shaking and grunting like a stuck pig. His seed is hot and disgusting, but it’s harmless now – the leaves she mixes into his booze every night made sure of that – and no other woman on this vessel will fall pregnant to him.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It was too late for her, though. Not that he’s noticed yet that she hasn’t bled in two moons.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He finishes and slumps across her, exhaling on to her face hard with curdled-milk breath, then rolls off her and reaches for a cloth to clean himself with sluggish movements, his eyes half-lidded with a daze of pleasure. When he’s like this, he doesn’t care when she rises from the bed. The captain’s semen runs down her leg as she slowly moves over to the window to gaze out at the stars and her whole body aches and she shivers in the cool night air, her body little more than just skin on her bones, but if the small life growing inside her has been strong enough to endure starvation and lashes and fists for two months then surely it is more hers than his.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>There is no view of the sky from the slave hold, deep in the belly of this creaking vessel. She lifts her hand to the stars, closes one eye, and smiles.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Whatter you do tha’ for?” the captain mumbles, one eye half-open and watching her. “You do it every time. Like the stars, witch? Put in a bit more effort and maybe I’ll let you stay in my cabin.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I intend to stay here with or without your approval,” she replies, lowering her hand, and returns to his bed where he has stretched himself out on it as though he is the Outsider’s gift to mankind, his hairy chest slicked with greasy sweat and his limp, purple, uncut dick sagging in his wiry pubic hair.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Eh?” the captain says, and pushes himself up on his arms to grin sleazily at her as she straddles his disgusting body – and realises too late that she has driven a dagger into his throat.</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>Somehow this windswept slum on the edge of Batista that was always riddled with bloodflies and silver dust and the rotting bodies of dead wolfhounds bloated with larvae has gotten even worse since the last time he set foot here at the age of sixteen. Every few minutes a harsh wind picks up, smothering the streets in a blanket of silver dust that cuts the skin and fills his lungs, and down the end of an abandoned, dusty alleyway a pile of corpses has merged with a bloodfly nest, the insects buzzing and glowing red with fury as he invades their territory, stumbling through the city halfblinded.</p><p>The twisting and turning of the cobbled streets, like a maze through the dust-drowned corner of this slum where hounds go to die and bloodflies come to breed, jogs some long-forgotten memory in the back of his mind. It’s smaller than he expected, or perhaps it only seems that way because the world looks bigger from the eyes of a teenager, but he knows this place.</p><p>And now that he’s here – relieved of half his coin and clutching a small bag of belongings he hastily threw together as he fled the Chamber of Commerce and severed the Arcane Bond and didn’t look back – he wishes he’d never come.</p><p>The tell-tale hiss of air that indicates another dust storm is sweeping up stings in his ear, and Daud grits his teeth, shifting his bag over his shoulder, and dives inside the Crone’s Hand Saloon for shelter before the specks of silver can cut his face and fill his lungs, though the inside of the bar isn’t much better for his health than if he’d stayed outside to suffocate. Cigar smoke clogs the air, hanging at eye-level around the bar, but the smell is a familiar one and his mouth aches for the feel of a cigarette between his lips which he has deprived himself of for three weeks.</p><p>“Haven’t seen you around here before,” the bartender says when Daud slides into a seat at the bar, grimacing and brushing silver dust from his hair and face. “Traveller?”</p><p>Does he look so different? So foreign? The only thing his mother ever told him about the man who sired him was that he was Serkonan, and the duskiness of his skin used to be enough of a giveaway.</p><p>“Native,” Daud replies shortly. “Returning. It’s been a while.”</p><p>Almost twenty-six years.</p><p>The bartender rubs a glass with a filthy rag, making it dirtier than it had been originally, and sets it down under the tap to fill it to the brim with beer.</p><p>“Have this one on the house,” he says, sliding the drink over. Daud catches it deftly; the foam spills down the edge and across his fingers. “Welcome home.”</p><p>Home.</p><p>This was his home, once, but being here doesn’t fill that aching emptiness in his chest that has been gaping like a weeping wound since the moment Corvo Attano let his blade fall from his throat, sparing his worthless life after he begged for mercy, the way he foolishly hoped it would.</p><p>The place is different, the people are different, the gangs are choking the streets and the bloodflies are choking the air. This corroding Jewel of the South has rotted from the inside, just like Dunwall.</p><p>Or maybe it only seems that way because he’s the one who has rotted.</p><p>Outside, the dust storm rages.</p><p>Daud grimaces. “Thanks,” he says, and takes a sip of the bitter beer, nursing it silently while the bartender wipes the benchtop down. He finds himself watching the old man, whose hair is silver either from age or because he doesn’t wash the dust out. Weathered skin, creased eyes, slouched over from either age or general weariness of life. Kind eyes, which surprises him. Daud frowns down into his drink. “How long have you lived in Batista?”</p><p>The bartender slings the rag over his shoulder and comes back over. “Seventy-eight years,” hesays. “Born and bred.”</p><p>Hmm. “Perhaps you can point me in the right direction,” Daud says. “I’m looking for a woman.”</p><p>“Ain’t we all?”</p><p>Daud scowls. “A woman called Jocheved,” he says. “If she’s still alive, she’ll be about sixty.”</p><p>And if she isn’t alive, then all of this was a waste of time and he might as well just go back to Dunwall and face the firing squad because there’s nothing else.</p><p>“Don’t know of anyone called Jocheved ‘round here, son. Sorry.”</p><p>Daud sits silently, nursing his drink some more while the wind outside starts to die down. “They called her the Witch of Batista,” he finally says.</p><p>The bartender’s demeanour changes. He stands up straight now, the slouch in his shoulders falling away with either shock or indignation, and his face twists into a glare.</p><p>“Now listen here,” he says, pointing in Daud’s face. “You don’t want anything to do with that old crone, you got it? She’s bad news. I ain’t never met her, but word is she’s Pandyssian, and if you cross her the wrong way –”</p><p>He draws his finger across his throat, and Daud remembers himself at the age of seven, his mouth hanging open in a silent scream as a man who tried to drive a knife through his chest writhed and convulsed in the dirt, clutching his blistering, corroding face which burned away under his hands.</p><p>“Daud,” his mother had hissed, yanking him hard into her arms as she kicked the vial, the contents of which she’d splashed in his would-be killer’s face. Daud remembers the man’s incoherent howls, driving deep into his mind like someone was stabbing his brain through his eyes, and he’d flinched hard in his mother’s hold. She grabbed his face, forcing him to meet her dark eyes, hard with fury and rage. “Daud. Did he touch you? Are you hurt?”</p><p>He remembers blinking at her, then shaking his head, a small whimper escaping his lips, and she’d kissed his brow and clutched him close to her chest. He remembers pressing his ear to her heartbeat, the pounding sound loud enough to drown out the man’s dying screams.</p><p>“Yeah,” Daud says, and when he takes another sip of the bitter beer he realises his hand is shaking so badly the grotty amber liquid spills over the rim of the glass. “That’s her. She’s alive, then.”</p><p>“Not for lack of trying on the Overseers’ parts,” the bartender says. “And the only other people I know of who want to see her are because they want someone poisoned.”</p><p>The corner of Daud’s mouth twists. “That so.”</p><p>“You don’t look like an Overseer to me.”</p><p>“I’ll drink to that,” Daud murmurs and drains the glass. “Where do I find her?”</p><p>She may not have moved, but Daud was fourteen when he last walked these streets, sixteen when he left Serkonos for good, and his memory of the area has faded like the lines of a parchment fading after being left outdoors in the sun and the rain for weeks.</p><p>The old man shakes his head. “It’s on your head if you want to get involved with her,” he says, but brings out a small map of the area and points to a cluster of alleyways, showing him where the apothecary is.</p><p>Daud nods and lays a coin down on the counter. “For your trouble,” he says, rising from the stool.</p><p>The bartender sighs, but accepts it. “Good luck, son,” he says, tucking the coin into the till. “You’ll need it.”</p><p>He needs something a bit stronger than luck, but he appreciates the sentiment.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <em>The freed slaves become her crew, emerging from the chains and filth and muck deep in the belly of the ship on to the deck, blearily blinking in the sunlight and relearning what it is like to breathe fresh air instead of the smell of piss and shit and vomit and gangrenous limbs. They are starving, they are angry, and they want to throw the captain’s men overboard so that they don’t waste the remainder of the food that needs to last the next six months.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She understands the sentiment, but the food held in reserve is non-perishable and will need to be rationed, and merely throwing their tormentors overboard will be a waste.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“The food will keep,” she tells the men and women and children who stand there in stolen clothes too big for their malnourished frames. She turns to the captain’s crew, restrained in the very shackles they’d clasped around the wrists and ankles of their human cargo, and takes note of which ones look well-fed and free of disease.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When she arrives in the land they call the Jewel of the South, she is at the end of her eighth month and feels the child growing inside of her becoming impatient. She leaves the ship and its people behind, her ankles aching and her belly swollen, and ambles her way through the strange city which smells of dust and salt water and fish, cooking together in the heat of this burning southern sun. The months at sea have hardened her skin; she no longer blisters under the rays, her skin no longer turning red and peeling, but she thinks she will never get used to the weight of the superheated air, covering the city like a blanket.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is not quite nineteen when she gives birth in a charity home run by the Oracles, surrounded by well-meaning women who hold her hands and tell her to breathe and push and press a damp cloth to her sweaty forehead, but she doesn’t listen to them because she knows what her body is telling her. The child is an insolent shit before he even comes out to stain the world, turned around in the breach position in her womb. She slaps the woman with tears in her eyes and fear in her voice and tells her to get between her legs and put her hand up there to guide the boy’s head out, and she tears and bleeds so much she passes out, only to be woken by the sound of the child’s screams.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“He’s… alive,” the Oracle tells her, passing over the screaming bundle, and as she brings the child to her breast, he quietens and begins to drink.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She sees why the young woman failed to come up with any other adjectives, like ‘healthy’ or ‘handsome’. She was never a beautiful woman; her features too hard, too violent, to be considered anything other than ‘bearable’. Though only just born, she thinks she can see her hardness, her eyes, even her expressions, in him. The only thing he has of the pig who sired him is that too-large, slightly deformed chin.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She can live with that.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“This world will try to take everything from you,” she whispers to her son, suckling the milk that must be sour from her – this child that grew in her emaciated, brutalised body despite everything, like the weeds back in her homeland that thrived in the salted and poisoned dirt. This ugly, squalling thing who thrashes his fists and rages at the world, born without innocence and even fewer expectations – he is like her so much already, and he has stolen the black lump of coal in her chest she has the gall to call a heart. She rocks him and holds him close as he drinks, and a tear slips down the side of her face. “But it will never take your name.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The child sucks at her sore, swollen nipple is oblivious as she strokes a finger across his cheek and draws in a shuddering breath.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Daud.”</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>It is late, and he has been standing outside the witch’s apothecary for the better part of an hour, raising his fist to knock at the door and lowering it again to storm off furiously, then storming back to raise his fist and storming off again, his face twisted into a scowl for being so fucking stupid.</p><p>There is no plan. No speech prepared. Three weeks ago he was kneeling the filth and muck of the crumbled Chamber of Commerce, a watery grave for a broken man, the undignified culmination of his entire worthless life of indiscriminate killing for coin and bitterness and regret held at the end of Corvo Attano’s sword which should have ended there.</p><p>Instead Attano showed mercy and Daud was stuck with his worthless life and he still doesn’t know what to do with it.</p><p>There’s no point to this. He thought she was dead. He thought –</p><p>He doesn’t know what he thought. He left Serkonos at the age of sixteen and his mind strayed to her from time to time but two years under the grip of the man who stole him off the streets, the man who made him do things and had things done to him, soured something deep inside his chest that never recovered, and he didn’t want to go back to face the woman who bore him, so he left instead for Dunwall and never looked back because he was – ruined.</p><p>Why should twenty-six years of doing more of the same – of doing worse – change this? If he was ruined then he has no idea what he is now. He shouldn’t be here but he has nowhere else to go and –</p><p>“Either knock on the door or fuck off!”</p><p>Daud blinks and takes a step back as the door to the apothecary flies open, and he comes face to face with the woman who brought him into this world.</p><p>She is older. At the age of sixty – or sixty-one, or maybe older, he doesn’t know for sure – her pitch-black hair is now streaked with grey, but still curled up into that severe bun at the nape of her neck, pulled taut against her head. Her face is hard and weathered so badly it’s like gazing into a mirror, but more wrinkles now mar her features than they ever did when he was a boy. Her lips form a thin, deeply unimpressed line, and that’s familiar too, a grimace just shy of a scowl.</p><p>But her eyes are not the dark, hard pinpoints of fury that he remembers. His mother was never a beautiful woman but she was severe – interesting, even – and her eyes were the one thing about her face that he could never, ever forget, no matter how far he ran or how many crimes he committed, because every time he caught sight of himself in a reflective surface he would see her.</p><p>No longer. Her eyes are milky-white and unseeing and scarred, the flesh around them burned, and she blindly stares straight through him. Clutched in her right, gnarled hand is a cane, and her left hand grips the door.</p><p>He opens his mouth to speak, but no sound comes out.</p><p>“Well?” she says sharply. “It’s after midnight. What do you want?”</p><p>He glances up at the night sky to find where the moon is positioned – the way she taught him – and realises she’s right, and something painful stabs at his chest but before he can analyse it, the witch smacks her cane sharply against his shin, making him stagger with an undignified yelp.</p><p>“I don’t have all night!” she snaps. “Speak up!”</p><p>“I’m after –” Daud says hoarsely, his frozen mind now racing through the inventory of poisons he knows to pick something at random, “– Serkonan nightshade.”</p><p>She smirks, still staring at his chin where her eye level is.</p><p>He’s <em>taller</em> than her.</p><p>“We call that belladonna here,” she points out.</p><p>He’d known that, and had forgotten it until now.</p><p>“So we do,” he murmurs.</p><p>The witch snorts loudly, turning away from the door and moving back inside the apothecary without needing to tap at the floor with her cane, moving swiftly by the furniture as though she can sense it rather than see it.</p><p>“You couldn’t have waited until morning?” she demands.</p><p>“It’s an emergency.”</p><p>“You’ll pay double for the inconvenience.”</p><p>“Of course,” he says, numb as he follows her inside and closes the door behind him. She gestures sharply at the table to the left, urging him to sit, and he obeys as she paces around the counter to the lab.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <em>“Hold this.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He had such steady hands, even as a babe. A deft and delicate touch with which he could balance anything, from the age of three helping her around the house as she mixed her poisons and potions for the needy, the desperate and the murderous of this disgusting little city she has made her home.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Daud reaches out to hold the smooth beaker, filled halfway with a toxin common to Tyvia – one that causes slow-acting paralysis and, when consumed in high enough quantities, death. He balances it in his small hand, those hard, dark eyes of his that surely have no place on a child his age blinking as she tips the powdered mixture into the deadly liquid, neutralising the toxic agents and converting it to a recreational drug instead.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Good,” she says, and takes the beaker back to swirl, and passes him a vial instead so she can pour it in and bottle it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Ima,” Daud says after she takes the vial back and turns towards the counter, and she feels his small, steady hand tug at the strings of her apron.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Tch,” she scolds. “Call me ‘ma’. Our tongue makes the Overseers uncomfortable.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Ma, I have a question.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Usually her six-year-old son asks her sensible questions, like 'why didn’t you kill that man who smacked your behind' and 'what happens if you mix this herb with that one', instead of vapid things like other neighbourhood children like ‘why is the sky blue’ and ‘where do babies come from’, because the book of natural history that was given to her as payment several years ago taught him everything he needed to know and she filled in the rest of the gaps. When he announces his intent to ask a question, it’s because he hasn’t already found the answer he needs.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Yes?” she murmurs, half distracted as she wipes the counter down and carefully reseals the powered bag.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Is the Outsider my father?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Jocheved laughs, a sharp, discordant sound that fills the air like a smash of cymbals, and reaches down to ruffle her son’s hair. “Where did you hear a thing like that?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He shrugs, nonchalant and deeply unconcerned, only mildly curious. “Around,” he says. “Some of the other kids called you a witch and said that you must’ve done a ritual with the Outsider to make me ‘cause I’m so ugly.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She can deny everything except that last sentence. She tsks and kneels beside him. “I am no witch, and the man who got me pregnant was a vile creature, but as human as they came,” she tells him. “He bled, as all humans do. Gods of the Void do not bleed.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Daud contemplates this.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She smirks now, and touches his cheek softly. “And I’m sorry to say that I gave you your face.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Except for that chin. But that’s okay. Most days she doesn’t even pay attention to it anymore.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Her son shrugs. “I don’t mind it,” he says, and she stands, reaching for her ingredients to teach him about the next poison.</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>They say that smell is the sense most associated with memory. The apothecary is not the one he grew up in but the scent is the same, the air always smelled vaguely noxious, like bitter flowers and mint. But Jocheved herself smelled of elderflower and silver dust and sunlight, and that is what he smells now in this place, driving him to silence as she works. She doesn’t ask what the poison is for – whether it’s for an enemy, or a deceptive lover, or even for himself – and for that he’s glad because he’d have no idea what to say.</p><p>“You’re Serkonan by birth, aren’t you,” she speaks, running her hands across the counter to the shelves of ingredients, sweeping across and up to the box she needs without needing to see. She’s as swift and as elegant in her movements as he remembers.</p><p>His breath catches. Does she <em>know</em> –?</p><p>“Are you deaf? I asked –”</p><p>“Yes,” he manages to say. “I’m Serkonan.”</p><p>“Mm. I thought so,” she replies, setting a kettle to boil as she prepares the berries. “Your accent is subtle, but there. You spent most of your life in Gristol, I think?”</p><p>His mouth curves bitterly. “Wasted, more like.”</p><p>She laughs, a sharp, discordant sound that strikes something deep in the back of his mind, jolting a memory drowned under the blood he’s spilled and the crimes he has committed. He breathes hard and grips the edge of the table.</p><p>“How did you lose your eyesight?” he asks.</p><p>“That’s a bit of a <em>personal</em> question, don’t you think?” she replies sharply, crushing the berries beneath the flat end of the blade and looking up, but her blank eyes gaze right past him.</p><p>“Curiosity,” he says, noting her deft movements and the way she sweeps around her lab as though she can see better than a human with perfect vision. “It doesn’t seem to have hindered you.”</p><p>Her smirk is triumphant, but bitter. “Some Overseers paid me a visit one day,” she says, reaching behind her to take the kettle off as it begins to whistle and steam. “I showed them what happens when people intrude upon my property, but I was… careless.”</p><p>Fire? One of her own potions, splashed back in her face to burn her eyes?</p><p>“I’m sorry,” he says, wondering if things could have been different had he been there.</p><p>“Not as sorry as you’ll be if you try something,” the Witch of Batista warns, and only now does he notice the dagger at her side, the crossbow under the table where she works, and the pistol to her left, just within reach. A trap wire stretched across the floor between where he sits and she works, and a projectile launcher aimed at his head from the corner of the room.</p><p>He smiles. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”</p>
<hr/><p>
  <em>“Where are you going?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Her son freezes with his hand on the doorknob, looking back at her with an expression that is as innocent as he can make it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Out,” he says.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Showing off to the neighbourhood children again?” she asks, an eyebrow high as she wipes her hands clean of rosemary and mint. Daud shifts, his other hand tightening around the bag which no doubt carries the stolen crossbow. “You shouldn’t. It’ll get you into trouble one day.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“What do you mean ‘one day’?” Daud smirks back, slinging his backpack over his shoulder.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Jocheved sighs and shakes her head, gesturing for him to go. “Don’t –”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Don’t cross the Watch, don’t cross the Overseers, don’t do anything stupid, don’t upset any nobles, don’t come back and track silver dust all through the house, don’t make an enemy out of a real witch –”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Don’t,” she says sharply, but is unable to stop her mouth from curving into a smile, “be smart with me, was what I was going to say.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He shoots her a sheepish grin. “Sorry, Ma.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“And don’t be late returning. No later than sunset, all right?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“But, Ma –”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Children have been going missing around the district. Daud is too smart to be led away, too good at defending himself, but some part of her still worries. “I need your help in the shop tonight,” she lies. “Sunset. Got it?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He rolls his eyes, but promises, “All right,” and sets out.</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>“Here.”</p><p>He reaches out to take the vial of belladonna from her hands, his hand brushing hers as it passes from her grasp to his.</p><p>She frowns. “Steady hands,” she murmurs, then draws away, her lips pursed.</p><p>Steadiest hands in all of Serkonos, he thinks, and stares down at the hands that once held his mother’s beakers as she mixed her poisons, the hands that she held up to the stars to teach him how to navigate the skies, the hands that stilled an Empress’s heart and brought Dunwall to its knees.</p><p>“Two hundred coin,” she tells him. “One hundred for the poison. Double for the inconvenience.”</p><p>Prices have gone up, he sees. He smiles and tucks the vial away in his pocket, and pulls out two bags of coin to press into her outreached hands.</p><p>She weighs the bags in her hands, opens one and rifles through the coins, then pulls one out and drags her finger around the edge and bites it between her teeth. She drops the coin back into the bag and lifts an eyebrow, her milky white eyes staring through him.</p><p>“An honest man,” she says. “You’re a rare breed in this world, sir.”</p><p>He’s never cheated a blind woman; he’s not about to start with his own mother. He stands there, frozen, not knowing what else to do, and eventually his mother snorts and tucks the bags of coins away, reaching for her cane again and tapping it impatiently on the ground.</p><p>“Well?” she says. “You have your poison. What more do you want?”</p><p>“I –” he says.</p><p>Silence stretches out between them, and she frowns. “You didn’t need that potion, did you,” she realises, her gnarled hand gripping the cane tightly.</p><p>Daud stares at her. “I don’t need the belladonna,” he confesses, this throat tightening.</p><p>“Why have you come? To gawk at the Blind Witch of Batista?”</p><p>“You’re no witch.”</p><p>“The reputation suits me fine. What do you want?”</p><p>“Nothing,” he hears himself say. “You already gave me the only thing that ever mattered the day I was born.”</p><p>She reels back. “Excuse me?”</p><p>“The man who snatched me off the street took everything from me,” Daud says, voice hoarse. “Everything, except for my name.”</p><p>“Don’t fuck with me,” the Witch of Batista snarls, and with a speed he would never have expected from a sixty-year-old blind woman, she drives the tip of a dagger which had been hidden in the handle of her cane into his gut with a shaking hand, pressing hard but not yet deep enough to draw blood. Daud grunts, but doesn’t move back or attempt to disarm her. “<em>Who are you?</em>”</p><p>“They called me the Outsider’s Bastard when I was a child,” he says. “Son of a Witch.”</p><p>“I am no witch,” she whispers, her lip trembling.</p><p>“No,” he murmurs. “But the reputation suited me fine.”</p><p>Her hand falls and the dagger clatters the ground.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <em>Sunset comes and goes, and then midnight, then morning, and she takes to the streets, first furious then confused then terrified, calling her son’s name and retracing every single step he took, from the bloodfly nests clogging the abandoned house up at the end of the street on the other side of the district where he’d thrown rocks at the mounds with other kids, to the lane where he’d set up bottles and shot them all out with his stolen crossbow, much to the amazement and envy of those who watched.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>No one saw where he went after that.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She doesn’t sleep. She doesn’t eat. She reaches out to people she doesn’t consider friends but still trusts to find out if the Overseers hauled her son in for ‘interrogation’, or worse. Five days after her son went missing, she finds the group of imbeciles Daud hangs out with from time to time, doling out stolen goods between them, and approaches them.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“You there,” she snaps, snapping her fingers at the youngest one that she’s seen hang around Daud the most. “Boy.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The boys all shriek. “It’s the witch!” one yelps, and they all begin to flee.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Her fist closes in the hair of the boy closest to her and yanks him back before he can bolt off with the rest of his snot-nosed little friends. “No –!”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Where is Daud?” she hisses, gripping his hair so hard she feels some of the strands tear out in her hand. “He’s been missing for five days and you were the last one who saw him.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Please, I don’t know anything!”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I find that difficult to believe.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I don’t! Please don’t make me blind, I don’t know anything!”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Jocheved snarls. “Yes you do. Five days ago. Daud shot out a row of bottles at the end of the street. You were there. What happened after that? Where is my son?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The boy has tears in his eyes, shaking his head and quivering. “All I know is that he left and a – and a man followed him into the alleys!”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Her blood runs as cold as the ice of her homeland. “What man?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“A – a whaler, he had a blade like the whalers do. That’s all I know, I swear!”</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>As a general rule, Daud does not allow people to touch his face. Billie had been the exception – vibrant, beautiful, treacherous idiot Billie – who once shaved his face when his arm was fucked up and he could barely lift a feather. She’d sat him down and made him tilt his head back, and covered his face with shaving cream before taking the blade to his stubble, her touch deft, and made a joke about taking advantage of the situation. He’d laughed, at the time. Anyone else who dared reach for his face ended up with a broken hand or a sword through their mouth.</p><p>His mother reaches for his face, and he does not flinch when her hand comes to meet his shoulder, the healing scar on his neck where Attano’s blade dug into the flesh and shallowly split the skin while he begged for his life. She finds his face, her gnarled but still so delicate fingers tracing his features – the healing cuts from where Delilah clawed his face, the lines, the weariness, the long scar down the side of his face, then finally finding the line of his jaw which she traces, her fingers playing over his slightly deformed chin.</p><p>“I – looked for you,” she says, voice shaking, pressing her hand to his cheek, and he closes his eyes and leans into a touch he hasn’t felt in twenty-eight very long, very painful years. “Every single day until –”</p><p>“I’m sorry,” he whispers.</p><p>“I wish I could see your face.”</p><p>“It’s all right,” Daud says. “It’s not much to look at.”</p><p>“Don’t be rude, boy,” Jocheved snaps, but she’s trembling and her shoulders are shaking. “I gave you that face.” She pulls her hand away. “Why are you here?”</p><p>“I wanted to see you again,” he says. “I have… nowhere else to go.”</p><p>“Nowhere else to – almost <em>thirty years</em> –!” she snarls, and her hand fists in the collar of his shirt, jerking him hard. “I thought you were dead! I thought you’d been raped and murdered and buried in a shallow grave or turned into a nest keeper but you were alive all this time? Where? Where have you been? You could’ve come back! You could have –”</p><p>“It’s –” <em>not like that.</em></p><p>“You have the fucking balls to show up after all this time because you have <em>nowhere else to fucking go</em> –”</p><p>“Ima.”</p><p>Tears spill from her unseeing eyes, which she furiously wipes away with the back of her hand. “Daud,” she whispers. “What <em>happened</em>?”</p><p>Too much to recount. Too much to relive, when all he wants to do is forget.</p><p>“A lot,” he says. He exhales, feeling so very, very tired, and bows his head. “I… burned up.”</p><p>She stares at the place where he stands, wringing her hands together. “You’d best sit down,” she says. “I’ll put on some tea.”</p>
<hr/><p>
  <em>The days turn into weeks and the weeks into months and the months, and she doesn’t take a single day off. She scours every single corner of this miserable place, braves every bloodfly-ridden house, the sewers, the docks, everywhere, and she cannot find the man with a whaler’s blade who followed her son into an alleyway, never to be seen again.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Before, she was quiet and kept to herself, killing only those who crossed her the wrong way or harmed her child or tried to cheat her out of coin, but now she stirs the entire neighbourhood, holding down people who match the man’s description and threatening them to give her information.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She becomes desperate. She becomes careless. The people appreciate her poisons and services, but the trouble she causes begins to outweigh her worth and their tolerance.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It culminates in this: five Overseers storming her home in the middle of the night, their swords drawn and their masks down over faces that are either snarling or salivating or even both. She is fast with her dagger but not fast enough, slashing at the first’s throat which covers her in his blood while the second kicks her knees in from behind and sends her to the ground while the others try to pin her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Witch,” one of them snarls in her ear, his curdled-milk breath hot and disgusting, and she smacks her head back into his and feels his nose crush underneath her skull while she reaches for the vial of corrosive acid, twisting around to smash across their masks to burn their eyes through the slits for sight.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It works; the one twisting her arm reels backwards, staggering and screaming as his eyes burn and blister away, and she scrambles to her feet to grab another but she’s not fast enough. The leader’s hand closes around the vial first and he kicks her in the gut, the two that are left standing pinning her down once more. She struggles and writhes in their grasps but the Overseer stands above her, sneering behind his mask, and uncaps the vial of acid.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Restrict the Wandering Gaze,” he says as she snarls and bites at the hands that hold her face in place so she cannot twist out of the way, “that looks hither and yonder for some flashing thing that easily catches a man’s fancy in one moment, but brings calamity in the next –”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She closes her eyes and thinks of her son, his face in her mind, his smirk, his uneven features, the chin she hates, the steadiness of his hands –</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“For the eyes are never tired of seeing, nor are they quick to spot illusion –”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Rough gloved fingers force her eyelids open.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“A man whose gaze is corrupted is like a warped mirror that has traded beauty for ugliness and ugliness for beauty. Instead, fix your eyes to what is edifying and to what is pure –”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The liquid begins to fall, and she begins to scream.</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>It’s a nice cup of tea. Jasmine, which he found too bitter as a child to enjoy, but soothing now, and he wonders if his mother has laced something through it to loosen his tongue or ease his tension. It stills the bone-deep tremble and warms that ache in his chest, and settles the nausea sitting in the pit of his stomach as he watches his mother beside him, sitting stiffly and just out of reach. “What happened to your face?” she finally says, gripping the cup between her hands, her milky-white stare gazing off just above his left shoulder.</p><p>Daud manages a small smile. “Now who’s being rude?”</p><p>She grabs her cane and smacks it sharply against his shin again, and Daud grunts, then chuckles, tracing his finger down the scar that stretches from the corner of his right eye to the middle of his cheek.</p><p>“I tried to escape from the man who kidnapped me. He made sure I wouldn’t do it again.” He pauses, thinking of the man’s wide, terrified eyes and his howls, begging for mercy, as Daud removed the offending organ. “Then I made sure he wouldn’t touch me or any other kid that way ever again.”</p><p>She closes her eyes and turns her head, and he wonders if she is thinking of another man who did something like that to her, once upon a time.</p><p>“Why didn’t you come home?” she asks.</p><p>“Shame,” he finds himself saying, staring down into the cooling drink and the swirling leaves at the bottom of the cup.</p><p>“What changed?”</p><p>“Regret.”</p><p>She inhales sharply and reaches for him, blindly grasping for his hand, and he reaches out too to catch her grip.</p><p>“There’s a spare room upstairs,” Jocheved says. “I left the window open yesterday so it’s probably full of dust, but –”</p><p>“Thank you,” he whispers.</p><p>“Don’t – <em>thank</em> me, you insolent shit,” she snaps, setting her cup down on the worn table which shudders and creaks as though it will give out any moment. “I’m not going to turn you out on the streets, I’m your <em>mother</em> –”</p><p>She breaks off with a shuddering sigh, and she grips his hand tightly before pulling away to grasp her cane instead, standing.</p><p>“Come,” she orders, and he stands too, draining the rest of his tea, dregs and all.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <em>She cannot see the stars anymore.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It is night, or she thinks it is anyway, because the burning Serkonan sun doesn’t warm and blister her skin and the thick, muggy air cools ever so slightly, and the breeze that blows carries the smell of silver dust lacks the viciousness of the storms during the days when the miners work the hardest. Night smells different from the day; the scent of street foods fading from the air, the oily smell of fish and whale blubber becoming background to the aroma of dust and death, sea water and blood. Somehow she never realised that night time is noisier than day; the sound of the hum and buzz of the bloodflies no longer drowned out by the familiar constant murmur of voices in the streets. The hounds howl more loudly when the moon is full and the ocean waves crash against the rocks which crumble into the water, eroding slowly but surely. One day this whole land will sink into the sea.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Underneath the wraps, her eyes still ooze and bleed and keep her awake at night, too painful to sleep no matter how many sedatives she brews herself with her grasping hands that must relearn her entire shop. She almost poisoned herself by accident when she grabbed the wrong leaves; almost poisoned herself on purpose when the pain became too much. It has been barely a year to the day that her son vanished from the streets, a year that she has lived in an empty house, and now cannot even look in a mirror to remind herself of his face which she fears fades from her mind with every passing day that he is not back in her arms.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The people who know her and took pity on her, helping her survive this world that is so cruel to even those who have not been rendered useless in the eyes of society, tell her Daud is dead, but she will not – cannot – believe this. She sits at the doorstep of her hovel in the dead of night while the bloodflies murmur and the hounds howl, and the cool silver dust dances around the hand that she lifts towards the sky she cannot see, to the stars she cannot navigate, pretending she is guiding her young son’s hand upwards and teaching him to close one eye and tilt his hand just so.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And she wonders if somewhere, somehow, he’s looking up at the sky as well, navigating his way home.</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>The room is coated in a layer of silver dust, but he doesn’t care. It’s a bed, it’s a room, and shoved deep in the drawers are – items, things of his he’d forgotten he ever owned, belongings he can’t bear to look at now because if he does then it’ll be too much and he thinks he might run again, the way he’s been running his entire life since the day he killed the man who held him captive, running and running until he could run no more, the Empress’s blood staining his hands like an anchor around his wrists, holding him prisoner until his crimes caught up to him, like an assassin waiting in the shadows to drive a blade between his shoulders and still his heart.</p><p>He hasn’t wept in years. It might feel good to now – cathartic, even. But he’s too tired even for that, so he dumps his bag at the base of the dust-streaked bed and takes off his boots, and throws open the window once the dust storm fades away and leaves the night sky clear, to lean out and light up a cigarette.</p><p>“We’ll speak tomorrow,” Jocheved had ordered. “Sleep.”</p><p>He wonders if she, too, thinks this is a dream. Daud draws a deep breath on his cigarette, the smoke filling his lungs, and he exhales before snuffing the stub out.</p><p>He will sleep. In a moment. For now, he peers out the window, closes one eye, and lifts his hand to the stars.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I'm just so <em>fascinated</em> with the idea of Daud's mother.</p><p>I originally posted this story in 2017, but then pulled it down when I moved on to original fiction. Then I found the old document in my folders during a computer clean-up last weekend and reread it and thought, hey, what the hell? So here it is again. I'm still proud of this fic. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. If you like my writing, come follow me on my  <a href="https://hlmoorewrites.tumblr.com/deathsembrace">Tumblr</a> - I've written a book!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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